Thursday, April 14, 2016

Melbourne

Well, here I am in Melbourne. I've been here a few days, and have done my usual walkabout through the city. I've checked out the city center thoroughly (referred to here as the CBD), have walked along the river, Victoria Harbour, many of the beaches, and random areas of town. Yesterday I just jumped on a random tram and got off at a random place, and I wasn't disappointed. I'm able to do that because I bought a one-week Myki Pass, which allows me too take as many trams, trains and buses  I want within the city.

I had a transportation pass left over from Sydney with some money on it, and I ended up giving it to a German woman in my hostel room who is headed to Sydney next. Glad that somebody was able to use it.

The hostel here...well, I don't really want to denigrate it; it's a nice place to stay in some ways, but it is grimy, noisy, and the bathrooms are nearly unapproachable. That's saying a lot, because I have a high tolerance for conditions most probably couldn't tolerate. Also, the floors in the bathrooms are super slippery. I've been moving on them like I'm walking on ice; positioning my center of weight directly vertically above my foot and moving slowly and deliberately. A couple of people have told me they fell in the bathroom. You would think they could invest a little in some floor grips.

Also, there are some really messed up things about hostel culture, and this place seems to magnify some of those things. The drunken parties are no big deal to me. But there were a couple of drunken oafs in my suite who just rape cultured all over the place. They were saying really filthy, sexist things, climbing into bed with some of the women in the room in an unwanted fashion, beating on their beds in the middle of the night and jostling them to wake them up, and engaging in other forms of harassment. One woman asked them to please be quiet when they were making massive amounts of noise in the room in the wee hours of the morning (I mostly slept through this, but sort of woke up briefly in the middle of the screaming match); they berated her and called her a cunt, and she rightfully went off on them. She filled me in on the details in the morning, it sounded horrifying and I wish I had been more awake so I could chime in that was not OK. The sad thing is that she had been really helpful to both of them in helping them find job leads in the area she had just come from, and had given them lots of contacts and advice.

But all in all, despite the grime and weirdness, I've met some good people, seen some cool things, and had a good time most of the time.

I've just about given up on posting pictures here. It is an incredible ordeal. The other night, it took me about nine hours to upload three sets of pics and some blog posts, and then two of them just disappeared and all three froze up when I tried to publish them. So I guess my pics will have to just go on Facebook...look there if you want to see images. There is the possibility that I may set up a WordPress blog on a subdomain at some point, but I'll have to take the time to figure that all out, and I don't have a huge amount of confidence that would work better with my slow computer and spotty connections.

No comments:

Post a Comment